Federated Filter Approach for GNSS Network Processing

A large number of service providers in countries all over the world have established GNSS reference station networks in the last years and are using network software today to provide a correction stream to the user as a routine service. In current GNSS network processing, all the geometric related information such as ionospheric free carrier phase ambiguities from all stations and satellites, tropospheric effects, orbit errors, receiver and satellite clock errors are estimated in one centralized Kalman filter. Although this approach provides an optimal solution to the estimation problem, however, the processing time increases cubically with the number of reference stations in the network. Until now one single Personal Computer with Pentium 3.06 GHz CPU can only process data from a network consisting of no more than 50 stations in real time. In order to process data for larger networks in real time and to lower the computational load, a federated filter approach can be considered. The main benefit of this approach is that each local filter runs with reduced number of states and the computation time for the whole system increases only linearly with the number of local sensors, thus significantly reduces the computational load compared to the centralized filter approach. This paper presents the technical aspect and performance analysis of the federated filter approach. Test results show that for a network of 100 reference stations, with the centralized approach, the network processing including ionospheric modeling and network ambiguity fixing needs approximately 60 hours to process 24 hours network data in a 3.06 GHz computer, which means it is impossible to run this network in real time. With the federated filter approach, only less than 1 hour is needed, 66 times faster than the centralized filter approach. The availability and reliability of network processing remain at the same high level.